1. A user will be able to pull the device out of his pocket with one hand, and look at his incoming messages. Writing messages in portrait mode will be impossible without a vertical virtual keyboard, but it is less important as people check on messages way more frequently than write them.

2. Portrait oriented lists can contain much more entries than landscape lists, so a user can see more messages at once when quickly checking his email/IM status.

Solutions for this brainstorm

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Solution #1: Add vertical orientation support to Conversations

Make individual Conversations windows support rotation (should not be difficult as there are very few visual elements there). Reuse nice vertical contacts list from the Phone application as the generalized contacts list. That list also has the easy alphabetic access, something Conversations does not have.